


The Center Cannot Hold

by whereismygarden



Series: play on, give me excess [13]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Golden Lace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-21 23:01:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/905988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things change slowly, then quickly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Center Cannot Hold

Things changed subtly, the way the seasons moved: fall gave over into winter, the air was a little bit colder every morning, and he and Lacey warmed up. Just little by little, but he welcomed every casual touch on his shoulder, every time he could admire her without fear that she’d reject his appreciation. The day she pecked him on the cheek without ulterior motive had him smiling for a good few hours afterward.

                Not everything was different: it was still a secret, and they still spent most of the time fumbling and gasping in stolen corners. But everything was sweeter when he could kiss her when he was buried inside her in the woods, when he could just give her things (small things, not obvious things) that she liked instead of watching her touch them wistfully on the shelves.

                She walked into his house early on the weekends and fucked him to full alertness, and she was better than coffee. He bought a small bunch of flowers from her father’s shop and presented her with them as a joke, the next morning, but she smiled sweetly and threaded some of the baby’s breath and lavender into her hair, leaving the rest in a vase in his shop until she came back from school.

                They needed to be more discreet, he knew it, but Lacey’s birthday was only a month away, and he planned to walk up to her in the street and kiss her senseless in front of half the town. She didn’t appreciate romance, and had half-laughed at his flowers, but he knew she liked to lean against him and talk. Maybe it would be better when it could all be in the open, when they could be whatever they were in the light and not the dark. He didn’t want to romance her if she didn’t want it: he wanted the gleeful, dark joy of being able to mark her with his mouth and everyone knowing it was his work. He wanted to be able to buy flowers from her father and hand them to her while she stood in the shop.

                “Lacey,” he muttered, in mid-December, nibbling at her ear. She was bent over his desk, and he was bent over her, moving slowly, making her groan softly with his movement. She ran her hand through his hair lazily, rocking her hips back against him.

                “Hmm,” she said agreeably, and pulled his mouth to the back of her neck. He tugged with his teeth and she whimpered, and he put his question aside for the moment, rubbing at her clit with a finger and relishing the moment as she clenched around him and screamed her pleasure into the back of her hand. He followed her over the edge a few moments later and leaned over her, blanketing her body from the cold air of the shop as they caught their breaths.

                “Do you want to stay over tonight?” he asked, straightening slowly and putting his clothes to rights. “Bed, food, warmer than this icebox…” he trailed off. It was Thursday night, but Christmas break was upon them. They could fuck all night. He wanted her naked and screaming under him, tonight. She pulled up her knickers and tights and layers of skirts—and hadn’t those been frustrating, trying to bare her enough to let them join—and combed her fingers through her mussed hair.

                “I have to go water the greenhouse,” she said apologetically, and kissed him hard. “And then I open tomorrow, Dad hasn’t had a day off in weeks.” He grunted and squeezed her ass through her skirts.

                “Sometime soon,” he teased. “I miss the taste of your pussy, Lacey.” She pushed at his shoulder, but he heard the way her breath caught at his words. He could still make her stumble, still surprise her. Still turn her blood to fire, and he was glad of it.

                Despite his words, Christmas had his shop relatively full of customers, and Game of Thorns was busy with poinsettias and holly and mistletoe, and the next time he saw Lacey, it was on his property in the woods. She was dressed in jeans and a long coat, a ragged basket full of branches on her hip.

                He saw her first, and called out, making her jump in surprise and drop her basket: full of green and white mistletoe, and a pair of clippers.

                “What the hell are you doing out here?” she said. He spread his hands.

                “I own this land, dearie,” he pointed out, and her expression turned shifty.

                “Um. I didn’t know that.” She indicated the basket. “I guess I’m stealing.” He eyed the plants.

                “You climbed for those?” he asked. She nodded: her face was flushed beyond what a walk would warrant, and there were pine needles clinging to her hair. Gold raised his eyebrows, impressed. “You know, I’m very hard on thieves,” he pointed out, leaning on his cane. Lacey folded her arms. “But I could be persuaded to some other form of payment.”

                That was all he got out before Lacey had him pushed up against a tree and knelt in the snow. The cold air coupled with her hot mouth had him coming hard and fast, fingers scraping away pieces of bark as he gritted his teeth, chasing silence. She swallowed—she always swallowed, and he wondered if she had guessed that he liked that she did, or if she simply preferred to—stood up with a wicked grin, then rinsed her mouth with a handful of snow.

                Winter deepened: the holidays neared their end. Lacey ended up in his house more than once, ad he repaid her for her stunt in the snow, using his tongue on her until she screamed. He gave her an old necklace from his shop, with a blue drop on a narrow chain, as Christmas present, and she scrunched up on the couch and admitted she had not thought to get him anything. He said something disgustingly sappy in return and dragged her upstairs.

                New Year’s Eve he passed alone, with a book and his usual glass of water: Lacey had a party, of course. No doubt she would be by the shop within the next few days, and then school would resume and their days would fall back into their usual pattern. He still needed to ask her if he could kiss her in public after her birthday.

                Eventually, his book drew him in enough that he wasn’t preoccupied—that was one drawback of the new facet of their not-relationship, she stayed in his mind and distracted him far too much—and the hours slipped by unheeded as he turned pages.

                The phone rang at two in the morning, after he had fallen asleep in his chair at a painful angle. Neck aching, he stumbled to the phone, knowing it must be an emergency at this hour. Hopefully no one had fired a firework into his display window.

                “Gold,” he said tersely, and heard a clamor and someone breathing heavily.

                “Mr. Gold, this is Ruby Lucas,” the girl was Lacey’s friend, and sounded tearful. “I know about you guys, she told me, but that’s not important now.” It was important, more important than anything that happened in weeks: Lacey had told someone? The thought would have made him giddy, the idea that she considered him worthy of mention to her friend, if not for the shaky note in Ruby’s voice. “We’re at the hospital.” His heart went cold, and he was alert, the pain in his neck forgotten.

                “Is Lacey hurt?” he demanded sharply, but all he heard was a deeper voice calling to Ruby to return to the doctors, and the connection ended.

                He stood staring at the receiver for a few seconds, trying to process every possibility. Lacey hadn’t called him. So she couldn’t. She wasn’t dead: he would know, for one, and Ruby wouldn’t have her head together enough to call him if that were the case. She must be hurt.

                Fear squeezed his heart and turned every drop of blood in his veins to ice, and in moments, he was in his car, half-skidding on the poorly gritted roads. She would be fine: whatever it was, she would be fine. Once she had spent a good fifteen minutes listing every broken bone she’d had and how she’d done it. She had scars from roses and branches all over her arms and legs: he had seen and tasted every one. Lacey was unbreakable, but still his heart pounded and pumped blood that felt like cold water.

                Storybrooke’s only ambulance was idling by the emergency room doors, lights still flashing, and Gold walked in as fast as he dared, heedless of the cold air and his lack of a coat. In the distance, red fireworks sparked in the black sky: like a flare, he thought grimly, and pushed into the patient entrance of the emergency room.

                Ruby Lucas, who was holding an ice pack to her forehead and sitting in a chair against the wall, spotted him first. She had been watching, perhaps. Her grandmother sat on one side of her and a boy he vaguely recognized on the other, arm in a sling. Lacey was nowhere to be seen. Unable to give a damn about secrecy, he limped up to her and ignored the older Lucas’s glare.

                “Where is she?” he snapped. “Is she okay?” Ruby only pointed, through a set of double doors, and he followed her finger.

                Getting to Lacey was a blur of snarling at nurses and staff who tried to block his way, but eventually he was in a room holding a few doctors, two beds, and Lacey’s exhausted-looking father. The bed to his left held a blinking, morose-looking boy whom he recognized, through bruises, as the one who’d followed Lacey into his shop once. The other held Lacey, head half-covered in bandages, eyes puffy and closed. He could see her chest rising and falling, and that helped calm the burning in his head.

                “What the hell are you doing in here?” He blinked and found himself looking up at Dr. Whale, Storybrooke’s only surgeon, whose face was tight with irritation. Gold’s agile mind rescued him.

                “I heard there was an accident, and I wanted to know where it happened. Best to keep on top of property damage.” The doctor’s face twisted in disgust.

                “You can’t bully me in my own hospital. Leave,” he said curtly, and Gold did, with one last look at Lacey, to collapse into a chair outside the room. She was fine. Bruised, hurt, but fine. Ruby had called him because she was in shock, from whatever exactly had happened. He forced himself to stand up and stop a nurse with an imperious look.

                “What the hell’s going on?” he asked, without preamble, and gave his most merciless stare. The kind of look that said _do what I say or I’ll evict you_. She sighed and obliged him.

                “Kids were in a car, going way too fast, took a sharp turn and skidded on ice.” She frowned. “It’s absolutely ridiculous the way the gritting and salting is done, I’m amazed more people haven’t had accidents. Then again, most people don’t drive ninety—“ Gold cut her off with a look and jerked his head towards the room.

                “How are they?” She sobered, leaving her righteous indignation behind.

                “The two in the front did badly: driver’s got no sensation below the waist, and Whale doesn’t think he’ll ever walk again. As for the girl, it’s hard to say. Swelling in the brain from a concussion: they bored in and drained it—are you alright, Mr. Gold?” He managed to nod and flap a hand in dismissal as he sank back into his chair.

                They had drilled a hole into Lacey’s head because her idiot friend couldn’t drive. Morbidly, he wondered if he had been drunk. She and her friends drank often enough. He put a hand to his face and wished he had convinced her to stay in with him. But Lacey was Lacey, and she would party on New Year’s Eve, or what was the point?

                He wasn’t sure how long he waited in the bright fluorescent-lit hallway, while people passed in blurs, with carts and arms full of papers. Everything was harsh and white and smelled like disinfectant: Lacey wouldn’t like it. She liked shady places, liked to fuck in the back room with the lights off and the smell of old books.

                He pushed into the room after however many hours had passed, when it was empty, and pulled aside the curtains around Lacey’s bed. There was a chair next to her head, and he sat down, taking her cold hand in his. Some of her hair had been clipped away, and he could see blood dried on some of what remained. She didn’t react to his touch, only continued to breathe, in and out, and he sank from the chair to half kneel on the floor, holding her hand to his forehead.

                “Lacey,” he whispered, and his voice broke, after the strain of the night, after the strain of _months_ wasted in stupid games and struggles. “Don’t you leave me now.” He had a handkerchief in his pocket, but he was frozen, his free hand curled around the edge of the bed. “I love you.”

                The words burned like acid on his tongue: now, he knew for sure, because he needed her to wake up, or he would crumble away, turn into dust. He loved her, with all his heart, and she lay sleeping and bruised, and all he could think was that he’d never said it. He’d fucked her, kissed her, but he wanted to love her.

                He fell asleep in the chair, head on the edge of her bed, and woke up to a nurse shaking his shoulder.

                “Sir, you can’t be in here unless you’re family.” He sat up straight, rubbing his face with a shaking hand, and didn’t move. “Sir!” she said sharply. “Leave, please!”

                Lacey stirred on the bed, shifting, and her hands moved. Gold stood up with a jolt, ignoring the pain screaming through his stiff body and the nurse’s continued insistence he move. Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up blearily at him.

                “Hey,” he said softly, and tried to smile. “How do you feel, Lacey?” She blinked, frowned, and her eyes turned frightened. Gold reached for her hand but she jerked away, sitting up.

                “Who—who’s Lacey?” she asked fearfully, and her frightened eyes were blank, blue and mirrorlike and empty of the woman he loved.

                They threw around words like _amnesia_ and _head trauma_ when the doctors returned, but he didn’t give a damn. He stumbled out of the hospital, trying to let the freezing air and brilliant sun clear his head. The new year was cold and blue and fresh.

                It didn’t work.

                He sat in his car with the radio on for hours, head in hands, drifting in and out of sleep. He had his shop to open, tenants to chastise for shooting off fireworks and damaging trees as they did every year, but the center of his world lay empty and wounded in the white and clean room she would hate, and he couldn’t care.

                The radio eventually sputtered and he re-tuned it as he started the engine, pulling out of the parking lot as the sun and frost mocked him and all his plans. He was supposed to kiss her soon, in a few weeks. He was supposed to convince her to live with him, and make love to her without fear. He was supposed to tell her he loved her, and then she would love him too.

                “ _Head full of coppers like a beggar’s bowl, take her from the water to sky, God, take her from the water to sky—“_ He hit the radio so hard that the face cracked and his knuckles stung.

                Things changed quickly: his house was empty, echoing, and he found some of Lacey’s hairs on his couch when he returned. He twisted them together and left them in a wooden box in his hallway, a last part of their secret to keep. His bed that night, though he’d slept alone in it the last few days, was too big and empty, and he kept waking up to fading ghosts and the sound of metal wrecking.

                He was sure that at any moment he would fall apart, like a man made of straw.

**Author's Note:**

> This installment's quote came from Thea Gilmore's "Water to Sky." 
> 
> Many thanks for sticking it through to the bitter end, everyone!! I've enjoyed these reviews more than anything.


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